Nationally, politicians and police commentators have warned of the danger new stop and search powers could be seen to target particular groups.
Diane Abbott, Labour's shadow home secretary, said: "Random stop and search is a tried and tested method for exacerbating community relations."
In Wiltshire in 2017/18, black people were nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by officers than white people, with a rate of 11.66 people searched by 1,000 compared to 1.25 white people per 1,000.
Junab Ali, a councillor for Swindon’s central ward and the town’s first Bangladeshi-born mayor, said it was important stop and search powers were not used disproportionately against minorities.
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The Wiltshire police and crime board member said: “It’s taken my lifetime to build that trust within Wiltshire. We don’t want to lose that.”
Criminologist Dr Mariam Fitzgerald told LBC that a rise in stops by the Met Police in 2013 formed the background to riots in London that year.
She said: "It's the Section 1 power that needs encouraging - where you have reasonable grounds for suspicion that will give you the arrests, that will take weapons off the streets. Whereas, as in the case of Section 60 - which will provoke a riot - less than 0.5 per cent of those searches ended up with anyone being arrested.
"It is provocative - unnecessarily so. If you widen the net, you just provoke a riot."
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